A Revisionist view of Anti-Semitism

Esau’s Tears:
Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews
Albert Lindemann
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997
$70.00 cloth
592 pp.
Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald
Historians have become increasingly aware that their
reconstructions of the past are often influenced by the
intellectual blinders and political agendas of the present.
This is paradigmatically true in the minefield that is Jewish
history. So seldom do conscientious historians dare to tread
there that unblinkered investigations of the Jewish past tend
to have a more enduring value. Thus it is with Albert
Lindemann’s important 1997 book Esau’s Tears—
important because it deals courageously and honestly with
very sensitive topics in the history of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century anti-Semitism up to the rise of National
Socialism. Lindemann’s thesis is that modern European
anti-Semitism is linked to the “rise of the Jews,” that is, to
the very substantial increase in the cultural, political, and
economic power of Jews beginning in the nineteenth
century. That thesis is controversial because it identifies
real conflicts of interest between groups as central to anti-
Semitism. Although Lindemann is well aware that anti-
Semites often exaggerate Jewish behavior, and occasionally
even invent it, his book challenges the still common view
that anti-Semitic attitudes are nothing more than the
fundamentally irrational residues of Christian religious
ideology or the psychological projections of inadequate
personalities.
Lindemann develops a comparative approach, discussing
anti-Semitism in Austria, England, France, Germany,
Romania, Russia, and the United States in an attempt to
find commonalities and differences. Although the book
contains authoritative analyses of anti-Semitism in all these
countries, I will highlight Lindemann’s analysis of anti-
Semitism in Russia without, I am afraid, doing justice to
the nuances of his presentation. Lindemann notes that Jews
were highly resistant to attempts by the tsarist government
to russify them, remaining a nation apart in dress, language,
diet, and civil law. The tsarist authorities attempted to keep
Jews apart from the Russian peasants because they believed
Jews exploited the peasants economically and corrupted
them with alcohol. Jews were often in the position of
managing peasants for Russian aristocrats and in lending
money and providing alcohol to them as innkeepers.
Stereotypes of Jews as prominent in the liquor trade, usury,
prostitution, and criminal activity were hardly figments of
anti-Semitic imaginations.
Moreover, tsarist oppression of Jews was far less severe
than usually depicted. Jews could own land, engage in
commerce, and attend universities. Nor were Jews the only
group subject to restrictions and under suspicion by the
authorities. The requirement to serve in the military
reflected a suspension of a peculiar Jewish privilege, not an
anti-Semitic persecution. Most Jews were restricted to the
Pale of Settlement, but this area was larger than France or
Spain, and forty times the area of modern Israel.
Lindemann comments on the “cramped and intolerant life
of the shtetl,” as illustrated by an incident in which Jewish
men dragged a woman through the street, kicking her and
spitting on her for violating sexual taboos.
Liberalization of restrictions on Jews in the 1860s and
1870s resulted in economic success for many Jews but left
the vast majority impoverished—at least partly because of
their very rapid rate of population increase, Jewish
traditions that opposed strenuous physical labor, and Jewish
religious laws that influenced them to avoid certain
economic activities and enter others such as the clothing
industry and the food preparation industry, in
disproportionate numbers. Nevertheless, Jews were much
more upwardly mobile than other groups in Russia, and
their success placed them in competition with other groups
that exerted pressures to control the numbers of Jews in
business and the professions.
Rather than being planned by the government, as asserted
by historians such as Simon Dubnow, anti-Jewish pogroms
were spontaneous uprisings in opposition to Jewish
economic domination facilitated by the liberalization of the
1860s. Indeed, the government abhorred outbreaks of mass
violence as a sign of popular discontent and in some areas
was quite effective at preventing it. The government’s
response to the pogroms of 1881 was to place limits on
Jewish economic activities in order to protect the peasants,
to make it more difficult to move out of the Pale of
Settlement, and to impose quotas of around 10 percent on
Jewish admission to universities. The result was that Jewish
emigration to the West intensified, but the tensions
remained. Lindemann provides an extended discussion of
the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, noting the complex
economic and political context of the pogrom, the role of
an anti-Jewish agitator, and the exaggerations and
falsehoods contained in accounts of it by Jewish
participants and organizations both in Russia and the West.
Jews within Russia increasingly turned to revolutionary
socialism as a panacea for their blunted aspirations. Jews
were overrepresented among socialist revolutionaries in
Russia, as elsewhere in Europe and the United States, and
Jewish capitalists were involved in financing their efforts.
Jewish power and influence in Western countries was much
commented on and was widely regarded by the Russian
government as directed at undermining Russia and the tsar.
For example, Jacob Schiff financed Japan’s war against
Russia because of his antipathy to the tsar. During World
War I a large portion of the world’s Jews could muster little
sympathy for defending Russia and viewed Germany as
being more tolerant to Jews.
A very important source of twentieth-century anti-
Semitism, exemplified by Hitler, has been the belief that
Jews were instrumental to the success of the Bolshevik
revolution. Contrary to many historians, Lindemann assigns
Jews a very prominent role in the revolution. He notes that
“citing the absolute numbers of Jews, or their percentage of
the whole, fails to recognize certain key if intangible
factors: the assertiveness and often dazzling verbal skills of
Jewish Bolsheviks, their energy, and their strength of
conviction” (p. 429). This comment fits well with the
general tendency for Jews to be highly successful in a wide
range of areas requiring high intelligence,
conscientiousness, and personal ambition.1 Jews who
became radicals retained their high IQ, their ambitiousness,
their persistence, their work ethic, and their ability to
organize and participate in cohesive, highly committed
groups.
Contrary to claims by some that Jewish Bolsheviks had
abandoned their Jewish identities, Lindemann shows that
ethnic background was important to all participants in the
conflict between Stalin and Trotsky and his supporters.
Moreover, Lindemann points out that several of the leading
non-Jews in the Bolshevik movement, including Lenin,
might be termed “jewified non-Jews”—“a term, freed of its
ugly connotations, [that] might be used to underline an
often overlooked point: Even in Russia there were some
non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews,
praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their
welfare, and established intimate friendships or romantic
liaisons with them” (p. 433). For example, Lenin “openly
and repeatedly praised the role of the Jews in the
revolutionary movement; he was one of the most adamant
and consistent in the party in his denunciations of pogroms
and anti-Semitism more generally. After the revolution, he
backed away from his earlier resistance to Jewish
nationalism, accepting that under Soviet rule Jewish
nationality might be legitimate. On his death bed, Lenin
spoke fondly of the Jewish Menshevik Julius Martov, for
whom he had always retained a special personal affection
in spite of their fierce ideological differences.”
Citing Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews (New York:
HarperCollins, 1988), Lindemann notes Trotsky’s
“paramount” role in planning and leading the Bolshevik
uprising and his role as a “brilliant military leader” in
establishing the Red Army as a military force (p. 448).
Moreover, many of Trotsky’s personality traits are
stereotypically Jewish:
If one accepts that anti-Semitism was most potently
driven by anxiety and fear, as distinguished from
contempt, then the extent to which Trotsky became a
source of preoccupation with anti-Semites is
significant. Here, too, Johnson’s words are suggestive:
He writes of Trotsky’s “demonic power”—the same
term, revealingly, used repeatedly by others in
referring to Zinoviev’s oratory or Uritsky’s
ruthlessness. Trotsky’s boundless self-confidence, his
notorious arrogance, and sense of superiority were
other traits often associated with Jews. Fantasies there
were about Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, but there
were also realities around which the fantasies grew. (p.
448)
Lindemann notes that Jews were also highly
overrepresented as leaders among the other communist
governments in Eastern Europe as well as in communist
revolutionary movements in Germany and Austria from
1918 to 1923. Jewish agents in the service of the Soviet
Union also featured prominently in Western communist
parties: “Even within the various and often violently
contending factions of the nascent communist parties of the
West, ‘foreign Jews, taking orders from Moscow’ became a
hot issue. It remained mostly taboo in socialist ranks to
refer openly to Moscow’s agents as Jewish, but the
implication was often that such foreign Jews were
destroying western socialism” (pp. 435–436).
Nor does Lindemann shrink from discussing the biological
moment of Judaism, that is, the concern with preventing
intermarriage, the concern with purity of blood, the low
status of converts, and the lack of interest in proselytism.
Judaism is “only uncertainly a community of belief,” a
comment indicating Lindemann’s belief that Judaism is
much more an ethnic group than a religion—a position that
I think is unavoidable.2 Lindemann labels these practices
“protoracism” and suggests that they “contributed in vague,
often contradictory ways to modern racism, especially to its
concern with racial exclusiveness and purity” (p. 74).
Indeed, besides their traditional practices, which bespeak a
primitive racialism among Jews, Jews were also in the
forefront of racialist thinking in the nineteenth century.
Benjamin Disraeli “may have been, both as writer and even
more as a personal symbol, the most influential propagator
of the concept of race in the nineteenth century, particularly
publicizing the Jews’ alleged taste for power, their sense of
superiority, their mysteriousness, their clandestine
international connections, and their arrogant pride in being
a pure race” (p. 77). Racialist thinking was typical of the
nineteenth century generally. Among Jews racialist
thinking can be found throughout the Jewish intellectual
spectrum; it was common among Zionists and typified
several prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as Heinrich
Graetz and Moses Hess. Thus, while there was some
fantasy involved in anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews, the
nineteenth-century anti-Semitic idea that Jews regarded
themselves as a superior race was also based on real Jewish
behavior and attitudes.
It is not possible to write in this area without being aware
of the intense passions of many who have written before.
The book therefore, perhaps inevitably, deals centrally with
Jewish historiography and Jewish self-conceptions.
Lindemann (p. 535; italics in text) writes that “Jews
actually do not want to understand their past—or at least
those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred
directed at them, since understanding may threaten other
elements of their complex and often contradictory
identities.” He notes that
especially in popular history, a strong tendency exists
to favor an emotionally laden description and
narrative, especially of colorful, dramatic, or violent
episodes, over explanation that employs calm analysis
or a searching attention to historical context. Pogroms,
famous anti-Semitic affairs, and the description of the
ideas of anti-Semitic authors and agitators are
described with moral fervor, rhetorical flair, and
considerable attention to the details of murder, arson,
and rape. Background, context, and motives are often
slighted or dealt with in a remarkably thin and
tendentious fashion. (p. 12)
Lindemann considers (pp. ix–x) the impassioned, moralistic
rhetoric and simplistic analyses to be found in Robert
Wistrich’s Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred and in the
writings of Holocaust historians Lucy Dawidowicz and
Daniel J. Goldhagen. (Wistrich in turn labeled
Lindemann’s book “deeply pernicious.”)3 “In order to write
‘genuine’ German history, [Dawidowicz] seems to think,
hatred and resentment rather than sympathy or love
constitute the appropriate state of mind,” Lindemann
writes. “She makes precious little effort to understand the
motivations of nineteenth-century nationalistic Germans.
They are simply contemptible ‘other people’” (p. 509). He
describes Howard Morley Sachar’s chapter on Romanian
anti-Semitism as “a tirade, without the slightest effort at
balance” (p. 509).
Finally, one detects in Lindemann a certain
incomprehension regarding the powerful need among Jews
to remain a people apart in the contemporary world. After
showing that modern anti-Semitism is fundamentally
rooted in real conflict between ethnic groups and that it has
resulted in enormous bloodshed and intrasocietal
animosity, he asks, “What is the meaning of Jewish
survival in modern times to a modern, secular
consciousness? . . . How can Jewish survival be considered
any more important than, say, the survival of the Wends,
Byelo-Russians, Chechens, or Croats? In the context of a
multicultural society such as the United States why should
a Jewish ethnicity or cultural style resist blending and
‘disappearing’ any more than the cultural styles of the
Germans, Swedes, or Irish? Intermarriage and assimilation
have occurred and are occurring in most other
communities, but do prominent Armenian-American or
Japanese-American leaders publicly address the issues with
such terms as ‘bloodless Holocaust’ and ‘candy-coated
poison’?” (p. 543). He notes that Jewish leaders regard the
Jewish case as fundamentally different from other groups
and that the Jewish position comes close to ethnic
chauvinism. These questions are particularly relevant
because, as Lindemann notes, Jewish power and influence
are quite high in the contemporary world, particularly in the
United States, and there is no question that official
American Judaism is becoming more traditionally
separatist in its focus and more concerned to prevent
intermarriage.4 It is by no means clear that multicultural
societies characterized by ethnic chauvinism and conflicts
of interest among their constituent groups can long survive
without the intense intrasocietal hatreds and animosities
that have been the consistent consequence of the rise of a
powerful Judaism in Western societies.5
Lindemann’s findings fit well with an evolutionary
approach to group conflict.6 His book is concerned with
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-Semitism, but
these kinds of findings may be generalized throughout
Jewish history. Jewish characteristics, including especially
resource competition with non-Jews, have always been
central to understanding historically important examples of
anti-Semitism. Moreover, there is a long history of Jewish
religious apologetics and historiography that has functioned
in the same way as much contemporary Jewish
historiography, that is, to interpret history and Jewish
religious law in a manner that presents Judaism as a
morally superior beacon to the rest of humanity.7 And
Lindemann is quite correct in emphasizing the ethnic,
“protoracist” elements of Judaism, although here, as in
many other parts of the book, he is clearly bending over
backwards to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities. Jews
have indeed remained a people apart throughout their
history, and they have been deeply concerned about
marrying each other. There is a pronounced tendency
toward idealizing endogamy and condemning exogamy
apparent in Jewish religious writings, and the data indicate
that Jews have remained genetically distinct from the
groups they have lived among despite having lived among
them for centuries.8
Albert Lindemann’s thoroughly researched, informed, and
forthright interpretation of a key period in the past of the
Jews and the European peoples among whom they lived is
a vital contribution to that larger history as well as to the
history of anti-Semitism.

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology, California

State University - Long Beach, and the author of a trilogy
on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: A People That
Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its
Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998),
all published by Praeger 1994–1998. A revised edition of
The Culture of Critique (2002), with an expanded
introduction, is available in a quality soft cover edition
from www.1stBooks.com or www.amazon.com.
Endnotes
1. Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone:
Judaism As a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT:
Praeger), pp. 165–226.
2. Ibid., passim.
3. Robert Wistrich, “Blaming the Victim,” Commentary
(February 1998), p. 60.
4. Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents:
Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 263–278.
5. Ibid., pp. 89–175. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of
Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement
in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 303–332.
6. MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents.
7. Ibid.
8. MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, pp. 23–
110